Letter of Recommendation: Frans Masereel’s ‘The City’

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A 1972 paperback edition of “The City.”CreditWilliam Mebane for The New York Times

By Charles Siebert

May 1, 2015

I found it 20 years ago on a secondhand bookstore’s discard table, the sort of lucky accident that befalls only a prepared mind. It was a paperback 1972 Dover edition of a work originally published in Munich in 1925: “The City,” by Frans Masereel, a wordless novel made up of 100 woodcuts. The yellowed and slightly water-stained cover bore a blown-up reprint of one of the many indelible urban tableaus that I was about to view for the first time — images that I somehow instantly recognized, even anticipated.

For months I’d been seeking a way into my first book, a memoir about returning to New York City after a six-month stay alone in a cabin in the woods of Canada. And there it was, at the penciled-in price of just $1.75, a Belgian graphic artist and illustrator’s thrilled and terrified evocation of the teeming modern metropolis during the politically and socially fraught years of the Weimar Republic.

Charging the static, blocky medium of the woodcut with the newly emergent force of cinema, Masereel created wildly kinetic visions in which buildings, windows, streetlights, shadows, sky, stars and steam are all accorded equal weight, rendering even the variously engaged citizens as broken-off shards of the very brick and cement that surrounds them. “The City” opens with a classic establishing shot of a seated foreground figure staring out from a grassy hillside at the smoke-stacked expanse of skyline before him, the passing train in the near distance shown on the very next page arriving at the city’s central station in billowing clouds. Your full immersion in the marvels and malevolence of modern urban life is about to commence.

The pages shift between sweeping overviews and tightly interwoven streetscape clashes of human, animal and machine. We see a heedless throng of rushing commuters in one frame suddenly eddy, in the next, around a prostrate body on the sidewalk. An image of toiling laborers digging a foundation with shovels and pickaxes is juxtaposed with a placid, Hopperesque peek into an array of open windows: a woman sewing alongside a balcony bird cage; a man, one story down, his head at rest on his hands, staring blankly out; a half-naked woman in the apartment below him, slipping into a nightdress.

From scene to scene, we hover like Rilkean angels above bustling brothels and bookie joints, empty cafes and crowded restaurants. Along one late-night cobblestone back street, only dogs and cats lurk; on others are stumbling drunks or lone sobbing figures. In an ill-lit alley at the very bottom of an otherwise breathtaking steeple-and-spire-studded cityscape, a rape proceeds. Interspersed throughout are lyric, allegorical departures from reality: A pair of lovers rise in a Chagall dream-drift above the rooftops; a flurry of blank white pages blown from some unseen source waft above the buildings below, like homesick glass panes in search of a permanent resting place; a lone construction worker pauses­ atop the most recently cemented tier of a still ascending high-rise, his head bowed in seeming penitence over drawing us ever closer to the drifting zeppelin behind him.

The often lugubrious German Expressionist overtones of Masereel’s work notwithstanding, a childlike innocence illuminates even the darkest avenues of his vision. This is the greatest allure of “The City” — the artist’s tacit understanding that the close and often begrudging proximity of our private pursuits, however pernicious they can be, is what draws us to the city; a dynamic that gives the place a whole other life of its own, one its inhabitants both feed into and upon.

We’re always seeking escapes from its oppressions, of course, everything from the weekend park picnic to the prolonged cabin getaway, which allow us to see the city again for what it is: a natural extension of human needs and longings, as variously carved out, multitiered and tumultuous as a carpenter-ant nest. “The City,” in this sense, offers us a remove from urban life even when we’re here, fully immersed in it. A form of traveling in place.

I remember feeling deeply proprietary upon finding it, as though I’d personally discovered a little known master, a particularly absurd notion considering that Masereel was an internationally known artist in his day, the composer of more than a dozen wordless novels like this one. Not only was he championed by contemporaries like Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, he is also an often-cited influence on a number of present-day cartoonists and authors of the graphic novel, the form that Masereel is now widely recognized to have fathered.

None of this, of course, diminishes either the immediate or continuing thrill that I’ve gotten from having come upon that $1.75 first-print Dover edition, one that presently lists at $35 and up. For many years now, I’ve had on the walls of my Brooklyn apartment — the same one in which that first memoir was written and unfolds — six of my favorite woodcuts from “The City,” the work that helped show me a way into my own. I still get excited comments about them from those my wife and I let stay here during our annual summer retreat to that same cabin in Canada. As to the question of how they, too, might obtain a copy, I’m now able to pass along the happy news that a 2006 Dover reprint edition of “The City” goes for as little as $7.95 — an absolute song for an ongoing visit with timelessness.

Charles Siebert is a contributing writer. His last article for the magazine was about the golfer Rory McIlroy.

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